Dirty minds: how our brains influence love, sex and relationships

Dirty minds: how our brains influence love, sex and relationships is an ambitious book that attempts to discover what impacts the brain and genetics have on how and why; love, sex and relationships develop in human beings. The book is by professional science writer Kayt Sukel, and according to her was written to help her understand the inner workings of love after her relationship with her (now ex) husband dramatically changed after the birth of their first child.

It is important to note that the book is a discussion of what happens from a neurological perspective to people when they are in love or when they become attracted to someone. It’s not a dating advice book, which the author clearly states in the introduction, it does not try to tell you that similar brain chemistry or brain functions are the key to everlasting happiness and if dating advice is what you’re after this is not the book for you. If you love reading about neurological and biological studies told by a relatable narrator and punctuated with some funny personal stories, you have found a fantastic read! Though I am not a huge reader fan of biology and neurology I thought the book was a fun and engaging and it was nice that this Valentine’s day instead of reading how to attract a partner I was learning that my brain is an amazing organ and that every crush I have ever had involved some serious neuroscience.

The title Dirty Minds may lead you to believe that the love discussed in the book is of the 18+ variety and to be honest that’s what I expected when I picked up the book. Romantic love is the main focus however it is far from the only focus and the book explores some very diverse types of love. Heterosexual and homosexual attraction were the bulk of the book, but less expected chapters on familial love, religious ‘love’ and the idea of unconditional love were also present.  All of these types of love were explored from a neurological perspective and there was very little discussion outside of that. For example the book didn't go into philosophical or religious discussions about whether there is an all loving and all powerful God, instead focusing on how thinking about loving God impacts the brain. It makes no judgements about how people choose to love only that in every case the brain reacts to the feeling of love in interesting ways.

Despite how relatable Sukel is this is still at its core a very technical book and there are some confusing explanations of brain chemistry, most of them relating directly to the brain and human hormones acting on the brain. I could tell through Sukel’s frequent uses of examples and diagrams that she is trying to dumb down the science for the casual reader. That being said I still found some sections hard to understand, (especially since my formal training in biology stopped after 11^th grade.) Long names of hormonal chains and neurochemical processes were especially easy to get bogged down in. The book never quite got to the point where it was frustrating or made me want to stop reading. When it seems like Sukel is straying away from the core topic (love, sex and the brain) while talking about hormones or complex scientific studies she manages to bring the topic back to the original intent and tie everything together neatly.

There were also interesting sections on the male and female brain, discounting much of the Men are From Mars women are from Venus rhetoric that pop culture has given us. The neurobiologists in the book scoff at explaining away behaviour like infidelity or lack of sex drive as being inherent to the sexes. They argue that humans have a much bigger section of their brain devoted to cognition and reasoning so to blame things, like cheating on brain development is wrong. Though there are slight differences noted in male and female brain development, men and women’s brains experience love in almost the exact same way.

As the title would suggest the book is funny, though the humour is sometimes racy it never lived up the ‘dirty’ aspect implied in the title, though I am notoriously hard to shock or scandalize. The humour is mostly self-deprecating and ironic and the drier parts of the book are spiked with jokes and personal stories. One of the most memorable stories was when she participated in a study where she was asked to achieve orgasm in an FMRI machine. This study was to map how orgasms influence chemicals in the brain. The whole sequence of events leading up to and following the FMRI orgasm are told with brutal and hilarious honesty and vivid detail.

Dirty minds promises it will not promote or solicit dating advice or try to sell anything that would increase success in love. Sukel does not waver from that position. She explores various neurobiological responses to things like dopamine and pheromones and hormones but concludes that their actual impact on romantic love is questionable. Both she and the scientists running these experiments say that brain chemistry is only a small piece in a huge puzzle of what dictates love and attraction.

The book as a whole is more of a how things work guide to the brain rather than a why things work guide to romance. The studies cited tend to be inconclusive and are more focussed on showing that things happen rather than explaining why they happen and on the whole show little promise in unlocking a complete understanding human behaviour in love. The book notes over and over that humans are more complex than their brain chemistry and that a book focused solely on the biological aspect of attraction does not tell the whole story on what makes people attractive or fall love with one another. That being said if you are interested in brain chemistry, neurology, biology and love, this book and you will be a match made in heaven.  As for me I'm not in love with the book but more than happy to remain friends.

Find this book in the Mississauga Library System's online catalogue.

The Great Dissent: How Oliver Wendell Holmes Changed His Mind -- and Changed the History of Free Speech in America

by Thomas Healy

Freedom of speech today is one of the essential democratic freedoms that citizens have come to cherish. Less than one hundred years ago, however, people could be imprisoned for merely criticizing government policies.

Thomas Healy’s book, The Great Dissent, tells the story of how the United States came to embrace freedom of speech, as protected by the First Amendment to their Constitution. The story revolves around one man: Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. (b. 1841; d. 1935), who served as Supreme Court Justice from 1902 to 1932.

Healy traces Holmes’s path, his “journey toward enlightenment”, as the first-born son of a well-established Boston-area family. Holmes, already a veteran of the American Civil War, attended Harvard Law School and became an attorney. While practising, he worked on his book, The Common Law, in which he showed how the common law evolves, based on precedent. The only book written by a practising attorney, at first it earned Holmes much criticism, but went on to become one of the most influential books on law and is still in print today. Shortly after this publication, Holmes was named to the Massachussetts Supreme Court, where he served for 20 years, before stepping up to the U.S. Supreme Court. Until this time, he seldom wrote dissenting judgements, and those few did not involve constitutional law. 

In the United States, near the end of the First World War, issues regarding freedom of speech emerged. Did the First Amendment protect freedom of speech, and if so, were there any limits on this freedom? Should people have the right to object to wartime conscription? In peace time, did only those whose cause was “just” have the right to speak freely? Did those who worked to overthrow the government also have that right? Such questions formed part of the discourse. 

Healy’s narrative really begins with a chance meeting on a train in 1918. Holmes and his wife take the train from Boston to their weekend cottage. A young attorney by the named of Learned Hand also boards the train, recognizes Justice Holmes, introduces himself, and takes the opportunity to make a somewhat rushed argument for freedom of speech. Healy documents this brief conversation and the ensuing correspondence, which he argues may have started the evolution in Holmes’s views on the subject. In subsequent chapters Healy shows how Holmes’s very bright young friends – Hand, Laski, Brandeis, and Chafee – who held “progressive” opinions on the law, helped shape his thinking – so much so that on the Abrams vs. United States (1919) case, Holmes wrote probably his most famous and often quoted “dissent” – and found in favour of the defendants. 

This superbly documented and eloquent book makes “lighter” reading out of some fairly heavy –  yet stirring and thought-provoking –  material. The inclusion of personal letters, excerpts from Holmes’s written judgements, and photographs round out the picture of Holmes. Endnotes, an extensive bibliography, and an index complete the volume. This is a very satisfying read, especially for those interested in constitutional law and/or the history of the civil rights movement.

Find this book in the library catalogue. ♦

This book review was first published in The Business Bridge, the eNewsletter of the Central Library Sciences and Business Department. To read the latest book reviews on business and related topics, why not sign up for The Business Bridge, at: http://www.mississauga.ca/portal/residents/librarynewsletters.

Keynes Way to Wealth: Timeless Investment Lessons from the Great Economist

by John F. Wasik

No doubt you have heard of John Maynard Keynes (1883 – 1946), the famous British economist and father of Keynesian economics. Some may not realize, however, to what extent his ideas on investing have become key concepts, used by portfolio managers and individual investors worldwide. Investors can thank Keynes for “inventing” and developing such concepts as “opposing risks” within a portfolio; “risk premium”; and the “book value” of a company – a core principle of value investing.

Wasik’s book, Keynes’s Way to Wealth, follows Keynes (the son of a Cambridge don of modest income) from his beginnings as a student on scholarship at Eton and King’s College, Cambridge, where he especially excelled in mathematics. From there he entered the India Office as a clerk, and collected material for his first book on economics, Indian Currency and Finance. After returning to Cambridge to teach, he went to work for the British Treasury Office, and by 1919 was the British Treasury’s principal officer at the Treaty of Versailles. That year his book, Economic Consequences of the Peace, was published, in which he condemned the severe reparation measures imposed on Germany, and showed why Germany would turn to fascism.

Against this backdrop, Keynes began investing his own and his family’s money around 1911 (age 28), using the “dollar-cost averaging” method. By the start of   World War I, he was developing his theories – for example, the probability of a stock going up or down – and these were published in his next book, A Treatise on Probability, in 1921.

Wasik takes a logical, chronological approach to revealing what an investor can learn from Keynes’s methods. At key points, he provides detailed examinations of how Keynes succeeded as an investor, and how he became wiser and more successful from lessons learned through losing money, and how he then went on to further develop his investment strategies for creating wealth while minimizing risk.

The chapter, “The Birth of Value”, may prove of particular interest to investors. Referring to Keynes’s seminal work published in 1936, The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money, Wasik presents the crux of Keynes’s insights in two brief sections. He devotes one concise paragraph to each key point, itself expressed in one short, bolded, sentence for further emphasis and clarity. As an investment guidebook, this makes for an easy read; as a biography, the inspirational personality of Keynes himself engages the reader, cover to cover.

John C. Bogle, the renowned economist and investment manager, says in the Foreword, Wasik’s book is “a true gem – fascinating, carefully researched, and ... snappy and eminently readable”.  This is high praise, but well deserved – few books on investing or economists are this worthwhile or enjoyable to read.

Find this title in the library catalogue. ♦

This book review was first published in The Business Bridge, the eNewsletter of the Central Library Sciences and Business Department. To read the latest book reviews on business and related topics, why not sign up for The Business Bridge, at: http://www.mississauga.ca/portal/residents/librarynewsletters.

Stuff: Compulsive Hoarding and the Meaning of Things

Hoarding is a hot topic these days, and often approached through a lurid, sensational lens - eccentric recluses and their hoards of junk are exposed for public entertainment. You'll find none of that in Stuff: Compulsive Hoarding and the Meaning of Things by psychologists Randy O. Frost and Gail Steketee. Instead, the book is rich with insight based on solid research, combined with large doses of empathy, patience, and compassion. The book was written to help hoarding sufferers and the people who love them recognize and understand their affliction, and begin to seek help.

The words sufferers and affliction are appropriate, as readers of this book will learn. Hoarding is a serious psychological disorder that ruins lives. People with comfortable incomes live in poverty, marriages end, families are wrecked, children grow up isolated, fearful, and ashamed, all because of an addiction to amassing things, and a total inability to part with any material object.

Many people love to collect things, and most people in our culture attach emotional meaning to certain objects - things that we would find painful to lose or have taken from us. What distinguishes the healthy collector or saver from a hoarder is the same metric applied to most addictions. Does this behaviour cause distress? Does it interfere with a person's health and happiness? Frost explains:

Many of the people we see experience great distress because of their hoarding. Acquiring and saving things has wrecked them financially and socially, driven their families away, and impaired their ability to carry out basic activities of living.

Stuff is organized around personal case studies, people who generously (and anonymously) shared their painful stories with the researchers, and whose stories illustrate the strange signatures of hoarding addiction. Although not written in a tabloid style, the stories themselves are nonetheless amazing and sometimes horrifying.

You'll meet wealthy brothers who fill up their huge apartment until it's no longer habitable, then move to another apartment - and fill that up, and move again. You'll meet people who cannot drive by a mall without buying dozens, hundreds of items - although they have no money to buy them with and no space to put them. Then they don't allow anyone to touch what they buy. There are people who cannot part with a single piece of paper - not a cash register receipt, not a coupon flyer - ever, for any reason. There's the woman who collects cookbooks, piled so high on every kitchen surface that her kitchen is completely unusable.

Many strange and fascinating features come to light. For example, when a person who hoards sees photographs of her own home, she doesn't recognize it, and cannot - does not - believe it is the place she lives in. She's disgusted and wants to change. But when she's in that same home, within her hoard, she doesn't see it at all and believes it to be perfectly normal.

The authors show that help is possible, but progress is typically slow, painful, and yields only partial success. Forced clean-outs - often undertaken by a department of health, at tremendous expense - produce only short-term success. As the underlying issues that cause the hoarding behaviour have not been addressed, the hoarder re-fills the space, often within days.

Not only are the forced clean-outs ineffective, they are dangerous. There are several documented cases of forced clean-outs being followed by suicide. This reminded me of the horrific advice of some pseudo-professionals who counsel families of children (and dogs) with phobias to "flood" the sufferer with massive amounts of what they fear. The results are predictable and tragic: permanent trauma, often with dangerous, violent expression.

Yet these forced clean-outs may be necessary: hoarding is associated with extreme health and safety issues - malnutrition, fire hazards, and vermin, to name only the obvious few. (Readers with insect phobias are strongly cautioned: do not read Chapter 9! I wish I hadn't. My stomach still churns at the thought.)

The famous Collyer Brothers of New York City, whose names have become synonymous with hoarding, were killed by their hoard. Homer Collyer was incapacitated and depended on his brother Langley to feed him. One day, Langley tripped one of his own traps, and suffocated to death under a crush of bales of newspaper. Without Langley to attend him, Homer died of a heart attack caused by starvation. Homer's emaciated body was found first. After three weeks of excavating, workers recovered Langley's body - which had been only 10 feet away.

When the rumour spread that the brothers had died, it took police hours to create even the tiniest crawl space to enter the Harlem mansion. In the first two weeks of work, workers removed 19 tons of debris, and had barely made a dent. Even more amazing is the fact that the Collyer Brothers were not unique in the annals of hoarding. Stuff is full of many such extreme stories.

The psychological underpinnings of hoarding are complex and only partially understood. The defense mechanism known as avoidance is definitely in play. People who are afraid of experiencing any anxiety, unhappiness, or loss - all normal parts of life - find that shopping and accumulating temporarily assuages these feelings. By constantly employing avoidance techniques, they never learn to cope with these normal feelings - never build up the requisite strength and maturity to withstand ordinary stress - thus creating a cycle of dependency on the drug of accumulation.

During therapy, a hoarding sufferer can gradually - oh so very gradually - learn to face unpleasant feelings, learn that they can withstand those feelings, and can gradually begin to let go of their coping mechanisms. Frost and Steketee also point to other traits shared by most hoarders, such as an ability to find beauty and meaning in absolutely everything, no matter how seemingly trivial, and extreme indecisiveness.

Many readers who are not hoarders themselves may recognize hoarders in their own families. Children of hoarders grow up afraid and isolated, ashamed to allow outsiders to see the condition of their homes, learning to lie easily as they create cover stories for their parents, similar to children of substance abusers. Children of hoarders often don't realize that their "big secret" - as one adult child of a hoarding parent called it - is a recognized problem, that other households like theirs exist. Children of hoarders have found support, comfort, and coping advice through online and in-person support groups.

The final chapter of Stuff was especially interesting to me: the authors frame hoarding in a social context. Although hoarding has been documented over centuries and in many cultures, it appears to be more prevalant now than ever, a psychological disorder of our age. Consumer culture, which encourages acquisition and measures value according to things, would seem to lead inexorably to hoarding. We live in a world of buy, buy, buy, more, more, more.

If an attachment to material wealth is seen on a continuum, with an ascetic refusal of all materialism on one end, and hoarding on the other, what is "normal" in our culture falls much closer to the hoarding end of the spectrum. The authors reference the psychoanalyst and philosopher Erich Fromm, who contrasted a life defined by having versus a life defined by being. Fromm forecasted a society obsessed with possessions, where people were obsessed with having, in an addictive cycle of acquisition, fleeting happiness, followed by the need for more acquisition, but never finding satisfaction.

Frost writes:

Forty years ago, facilities for storing unused personal possessions were virtually nonexistent. Now nearly two billion square feet of space can be rented for storage in more than 45,0000 facilities, and most of that space is already full. In March 2007 the New York Times reported that self-storage unit rentals had increased by 90 percent since 1995 and more than 11 million American households rented outside storage space.

Frost explains that this is not temporary storage for people who had just moved. It is long-term storage - like a huge extra closet that you pay for, for stuff you never see or use.  (This review was originally published on wmtc.)

Find this book in the Mississauga Library System's online catalogue.

The Red Market: On the Trail of the World's Organ Brokers, Bone Thieves, Blood Farmers, and Child Traffickers

Scott Carney’s 2011 book, The Red Market: On the Trail of the World's Organ Brokers, Bone Thieves, Blood Farmers, and Child Traffickers, is not a book for the squeamish or for the faint of heart. If you can get past the slightly uncomfortable premise though, it’s an engaging and thought-provoking read about the implications of living in a world where the component parts of people’s bodies are attached to an economic value, and how people are exploited into literally selling parts of themselves for a chance to escape poverty.

Carney, an investigative journalist by trade and a contributing editor at Wired, begins his book by outlining the types of economic markets people are already familiar with: the white market which contains all the sale of legal goods and services; the black market which deals in the sale of the illegal materials; and the grey market which deals with legal commodities distributed through illegal means. Carney proposes a fourth market, the red market, which deals in the sale and distribution of human tissue.  What follows is a book focusing each chapter highlighting products that we all possess but have likely never thought of selling such as: bones, kidneys, blood and hair. The book also investigates the practice of paid surrogacy, illegal adoptions and paid clinical drug testing.

In his introduction he states how his personal interest in the subject matter began.  An interesting story about how as a teacher in India, a student he was responsible for committed suicide. As her chaperone he was responsible for transporting the body from rural India back to her parents in the United States.  This experience opens his eyes to the price tag that accompanies every human life, and how people become, in many cases, treated like objects after they die. These themes are present throughout the book.  The setting of India is important, as most of the stories are centered in various parts of India and its thriving red market.  However the book does recognise that the red market operates on a huge international scale and explores the global red market.

Even though this is his first published book, Carney’s journalistic expertise is on full display. Each chapter is well written and well researched. He has an excellent knack for finding and writing engaging human interest stories, in all of his interviews you get a good sense of the people he is talking to and how desperate their situations are. You also can see the immense amount of respect he has for the people he speaks to and interacts with. He never judges people who have entered the red market, instead he asks that the reader understand how they are victims of terrible situations. He does not however refrain from judging the middlemen and the people who benefit from the red market and exploit and coerce people with no other choice, into exploitative and potentially risky situations.

Given the subject matter it should come as no surprise that these stories are more often than not, absolutely heartbreaking. One chapter immediately comes to mind about a young boy who was kidnapped in India and adopted by an American couple who was told the child was an orphan. Carney interviews the boy’s parents in India, who have spent their lives trying to find out what happened to their son. Thinking they have tracked down the boy’s adoptive family in America they ask Carney to reach out to them and ask them to let them be in contact with their child.  Carney agrees and the family refuses to believe that they could have participated in something akin to child trafficking and refuse to reach out to the family in India.

Many of Carney’s stories reflect this, people believe that they are being altruistic but in reality they are not thinking about where their donated eggs, surrogate mothers and adopted children come from. Many people refuse to think about who may be exploited in the supply chain.

 One of the reasons for this, he suggests, is caused by the language that we use to speak about the red market. We ‘donate’ blood and organs; we ‘give the gift of life,’ when we become organ donors. This language he argues leads to people being exploited, since people do not think of kidneys, blood and eggs as commodities, or as something desperate people may sell in order to feed their families. We see them as precious gifts.  As someone who regularly donates blood I see this language being used in advertising by Canadian Blood Services regularly. Absent from their pamphlets is the reality that my blood may be sold to other hospitals for profit.

In the beginning of the book Carney admits there are no easy answers to solving the problem of the existence of the red market, he wonders if a system where the rich do not benefit from the bodies of the poor can exist in a world where people want to live longer, combat infertility and adopt foreign children. One of his proposed solutions is to have fully transparent donations. Carney argues that when every adoption is fully open and every organ is fully traceable, this will force people to see that the donations come from real people and leave less room for middlemen to exploit the system.

“The Red Market: On the Trail of the World's Organ Brokers, Bone Thieves, Blood Farmers, and Child Traffickers, “is an amazing read. At parts it can be disturbing, a tad graphic, though the pictures featured in the book are thankfully gore free. As someone who is squeamish and an avid avoider of any and all horror movies I did not find it too distressing and as someone who is a frequent blood donor as well as a registered organ and bone-marrow donor I found it absolutely fascinating.

After reading the book and thinking about the questions it raises, I too agree that there are no easy answers. We as potential customers of the red market have to ask ourselves if we are hurting anyone by helping ourselves.

Find this book in the Mississauga Library System's online catalogue

The Death of Santini: the Story of a Father and His Son

Readers over a certain age may remember Pat Conroy as the author of "The Great Santini," the novel and later, a movie for which he wrote the screenplay. The movie starred Robert Duvall as an aggressive, bullying father; the son was played by Michael O'Keefe. Conroy is probably best known for The Prince of Tides, a hugely popular novel from the mid-80s, adapted into a movie starring Barbra Streisand and Nick Nolte, directed by Streisand. Conroy has written many other novels and screenplays, and in general has been a highly successful writer.

A recurring theme in Conroy's work - present, apparently, in everything he writes - is a highly troubled family, featuring at least one person who is suicidal, and a cruel, bullying, abusive father. Although readers should never assume that a writer's work is autobiographical, this motif recurs with such regularity in Conroy's work that it's difficult to avoid the question. And in this case, the assumption would prove correct, and then some.

Conroy's father was indeed the model for the fathers portrayed in The Great Santini, The Prince of Tides, The Lords of Discipline, and all his other novels - with one huge difference: the fictional abuse was softened, diluted. Hollywood wouldn't have made a movie showing the real "Santini" - Conroy's father - nor would millions have loved The Prince of Tides. The story would have been too brutal, too heartbreaking for popular fiction.

Donald Conroy was a violent, sadistic man who beat his wife and his male children, brutally and often. Anyone who wasn't the victim of outright violence grew up with the terror of witnessing it and the fear of its wild unpredictability. Conroy the father told his children they were worthless losers, at every opportunity. And Conroy the writer was compelled to write his family into fiction, again and again. As Conroy says in this book's prologue:

I've been writing the story of my own life for over forty years. My own stormy autobiography has been my theme, my dilemma, my obsession, and the fly-by-night dread I bring to the art of fiction.

The Death of Santini: The Story of a Father and His Son is, in part, a literary exorcism, the writer's attempt to purge his father from his life at last. The book also explores the experience of transforming family members into fictional versions of themselves, and their reactions to appearing as characters in print and on screen. They are by turns outraged, mortified, and thrilled, and they sometimes seem to imagine that they are the characters, larger than their own lives. The reactions of Donald Conroy to his son's constant fictional versions of him and his horrific behaviour are the most fascinating and compelling part of the book.

Conroy's writing can be ornate, overheated, and melodramatic, and will not be to everyone's tastes. He is prone to sweeping statements that can sometimes seem a bit self-important. Given to understatement he is not. But his writing is vivid and powerful, often moving or disturbing in all the right ways.

My childhood taught me everything I needed to know about the dangers of love. Love came in many disguises, masquerades, rigged card tricks, and sleights of hand that could either overwhelm or tame you. It was a country bristling with fishhooks hung at eye level, man-traps, and poisoned baits. It could hurl toward you at a breakneck speed or let you dangle over a web spun by a brown recluse spider. When love announced itself, I learned to duck to avoid the telegraphed backhand or the blown kiss from my mother's fragrant hand. Havoc took up residence in me at a young age. Violence became a whorl in my DNA. I was the oldest of seven children; five of us would try to kill ourselves before the age of forty. My brother Tom would succeed in a most spectacular fashion. Love came to us veiled in disturbance - we had to learn it the hard way, cutting away the spoilage like bruises on a pear.

Reading about the violence that Conroy, his mother, and his siblings endured, I wondered that any of them made it through with their selves and their sanity intact. Indeed, some did not. I also wondered, again and again, what made Donald Conroy such a violent and hate-filled man.

This book would especially interest people who read and enjoyed The Prince of Tides and other works by Conroy. But anyone with an interest in how life and fiction interact may find The Death of Santini a fascinating, if not always pleasant, read. (This review was originally published on wmtc.)

Find this book in the Mississauga Library System's online catalogue.

Beauty Queen: Inside the Reign of Avon's Andrea Jung

During the seventies my late mother was a door-to-door Avon representative, more commonly known as an Avon lady. My brother and I have truly precious memories of receiving the monthly Avon deliveries from company headquarters, then helping our mother package the orders for her customers. She even instructed us on how to elegantly staple the receipts to the delivery bags. My brother and I can still recall all the fragrances, both women's and men's, from over forty years ago. My favourite was Blue Lotus but my mom loathed it. I still have a wide assortment of Beatles newspaper articles packed away in old Avon boxes. Thus my attention was drawn to Beauty Queen: Inside the Reign of Avon's Andrea Jung by Deborrah Himsel. Jung was born in Toronto and became the first woman CEO of Avon Products, Inc. The author Himsel was no outsider, for she worked with Jung as the vice president of Global Organization Effectiveness.

Beauty Queen was divided into two parts: the first was an account of Jung's rise and fall within the company. This was by far the more interesting section. I was less impressed with part two, about the traits of effective leaders, and what to look out for and what to avoid in the hiring process. Even though Himsel used Jung as her example in the second part entitled "Broader Leadership Lessons", I felt I could find this information in any leadership book. The main reason I picked up Beauty Queen was the corporate story and learning how Jung turned Avon around in achieving consistent double-digit gains year after year. Jung was the first woman CEO of Avon and she projected an aura that left everyone awestruck by her beauty and charisma. Himsel referred to Jung's charisma repeatedly, and it was easy to see why. After a history of male CEO's, Jung's trademark pearl necklace, flawless makeup, Chanel suits, model poise, elegant grace and friendly demeanor made everyone fall in love with her. She had the company in the palm of her hand the moment she walked into her first executive meeting:

"Her presence was palpable not only when she spoke but even when she just sat and listened. It was impossible to dismiss her. It was impossible not to be impressed by her."

Her staff fell over themselves in their quest to please her. Having such a willing and able staff made it very easy to produce the results that she wanted.

While Jung possessed many qualities of an excellent leader, Himsel was not shy to discuss what may have led to her downfall:

"One of Andrea's major derailers was being a pleaser; she avoided conflict and tried to appease others in order to maintain harmony, a tendency that can be traced back to the messages she received growing up. Andrea spoke often about how there were no disagreements in her house, especially at the dinner table, because disagreements weren't tolerated."

and:

"As a leader, Andrea could make people feel special, and it helped create extraordinary loyalty and performance. Yet her tendency to avoid being the bad guy would be a recurring problem in her career."

Thus in order to maintain her reputation, Jung may have turned a blind eye to poor performance. She has even been accused of ignoring scandalous corporate practices overseas, such as alleged bribery and corruption charges in mainland China.

Himsel made Beauty Queen a can't-put-down read during the first part, "The Avon Story". A few spelling mistakes during this section grabbed my eye, such as "JC Penny" [sic] not once but twice. I also cringed when I came upon "ying and yang" on page 57. Following each chapter Himsel reviewed the "Leadership Lessons Learned" and summed up the entire section with the seven factors that contributed to Avon's and Jung's fall from the top.

Find this book in the Mississauga Library System's on-line catalogue